Insanity about Iraq + Insanity about Vietnam = Neocon Reality

[Clutch Munny]

Seriously now (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6958824.stm), is there anything about Iraq or Vietnam or Cambodia in here that isn't too stupid to read without puking?

"Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people," Mr Bush said. "The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be."

Good christ. "Many people" said there would be be no consequences?

Would you people please just get on with impeaching this shithead and putting him in solitary confinement for the next 100 years, so that no microphone can ever again record the peristalsis-reversing inanity of his prattle?

This comes on the heels of my running across this (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007225), day before yesterday, while I was googling for examples of disanalogies.
in the case of Vietnam, the war was lost less on the battlefield than on the home front. North Vietnamese leaders themselves have frequently credited "the peace movement of the heroic American people" as important to the communist victory. Few military authorities would any longer dispute that the vaunted Tet Offensive of 1968 was a significant military defeat for the North Vietnamese, or that well into the early '70s the military balance on the ground had shifted in favor of the Americans and South Vietnamese.

Of course the standard neocon line -- now almost uniformly the standard media line -- of revisionist Vietnam history gets played out there, too. I mean, it's the Op-Ed of the WSJ -- you expect demonstrable falsehoods and cogni-cidal feedback squeals. But from the BBC, when you get a report like this:

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

...you expect at least some sort of public service follow-up, to the effect that these are largely grotesque misrepresentations and daft lies. Is there nobody in the mainstream who will point out what a pack of fucking lies the right is peddling about Viet-raq?

[LadyShea]

You just don't get it Clutch. We would have won in VietNam if we had just stayed there, like forever, and made it a state or something.

[Ensign Steve]

Is there nobody in the mainstream who will point out what a pack of fucking lies the right is peddling about Viet-raq?

Is the Daily Show in the mainstream?

That show just angries up my blood. I'm like "yeah, omg, they totally lied and broke the law and hurt lots of people, so what do we do about it? revolt? oh, wait. just giggle and make fun? okay then."

[Clutch Munny]

I don't think TDS has ever pointed out -- with, like, history and stuff -- just how completely manufactured this crap about Vietnam is.

[Ensign Steve]

Oh, I was going with the second half of the Viet-raq hybrid. I don't know thing one, manufactured or true, about Vietnam, and my daddy even served there. :dunce:

[godfry n. glad]

You just don't get it Clutch. We would have won in VietNam if we had just stayed there, like forever, and made it a state or something.

Hey... I've been waiting for the Kurds to apply for statehood.

[Clutch Munny]

Well, a couple of data points, offa the top of my head, would be that Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia partly on the strength of anti-Americanism stemming from the war in Vietnam -- and was finally deposed by... independent Vietnam. To blame his regime on America's getting out of Vietnam (rather than, say, America's getting into Vietnam) is about the stupidest thing anyone could say. Unless one were the current President of the USA, in which case one's capacity for the utterance of stupidities would know no lower bound.

[fragment]

Obviously the US should have just nuked Vietnam and repopulated it with Americans.

[godfry n. glad]

Well, a couple of data points, offa the top of my head, would be that Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia partly on the strength of anti-Americanism stemming from the war in Vietnam -- and was finally deposed by... independent Vietnam. To blame his regime on America's getting out of Vietnam (rather than, say, America's getting into Vietnam) is about the stupidest thing anyone could say. Unless one were the current President of the USA, in which case one's capacity for the utterance of stupidities would know no lower bound.

No...The blame for the Pol Pot regime should be placed squarely upon the shoulders of Richard M. Nixon, then president of the US, who promised to bring the war to an end to obtain election and then widened it with secret, and illicit, carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos. That certainly helped bring Sihanouk down, destabilized the Lon Nol government, and created the chaos that allowed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to take over. Of course, that all took place before the US finally left SE Asia (by two weeks; Phnom Phen fell April 17 to the Khmer Rouge, the US completed its exit from Saigon on April 29, 1975).

[Petra]

Obviously the US should have just nuked Vietnam and repopulated it with Americans.

I feel a song coming on... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vb0Mu0mhlw) (starts at 1.00 min)

[Freddy]

Country Joe has one about our troops in Iraq.
YouTube - COUNTRY JOE - Support The Troops (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEBQcqgcVE0)

[davidm]

Bush’s speech was historical revisionism at its hoariest. Who will believe him? Is the public so credulous that it will buy this bilge? Who knows? Americans are famous for forgetting history.

What Bush is suggesting, retroactively, is that the U.S. should have stayed in Vietnam forever. That would have entailed fighting a war year after year, decade after decade. This is an especially odd suggestion coming from someone who, like his vice president, dodged service in that war. I guess for the neocons, war is wonderful, just so long as they and their kids don’t fight it.

By January 1973, when Nixon went on TV to declare that “peace with honor” had been achieved in Vietnam (even he didn’t have the balls to call it “victory”) the U.S. had been fighting in Vietnam for 15 years, if you count the first advisers sent there in the late 50s under Eisenhower. We had nothing to show for it. The “peace” deal that Nixon got was worse than he could have in 1969, when he entered office. The Viet Cong were left with control of wide swaths of the south, more so than they controlled in 1969. Anyone could see that the fall of the South was inevitable.

The Pentagon had concluded by 1967 that the war could not be won. During his term in office, Nixon essentially carried out a prolonged, four-year withdrawal in which air power replaced land forces. He had to do this, because there was no way to defeat the Vietnamese insurgency save perhaps by invading the North itself, or using nuclear weapons. Neither option was on the table given the threat of nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union.

As Godfrey notes, the bloodbath that followed in Cambodia came about specifically because Nixon invaded Cambodia and destabilized the country. No invasion of Cambodia, no Pol Pot and no genocide. It’s that simple.

What happened all across Southeast Asia was because the U.S. fought a war there, just like — if a bloodbath follows in Iraq (as if it isn’t happening already) it will be because Bush invaded Iraq.

Bush invaded Iraq to dismantle weapons of mass destruction that never existed, attacking a country that did not attack the U.S. on Sept. 11. Of course, as I believe, the real reason we went in can be found in stringing together the first three letters of the original name of the Iraq campaign, which was hurriedly changed when someone noticed what those letters were: Operation Iraqi Liberation. Even that has proved a failure: Iraq is producing less oil now than at the start of the invasion, and none of it is secure.

Parallels with Vietnams are quite apt, just not in the way Bush intends. We went to war in Iraq under false pretenses, as we did in Vietnam with the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident. In invading Iraq, everyone was clueless about the true dynamics, history and culture of that country, and even now (!) many American politicians can’t tell a Shiite from a Sunni. Similarly in Vietnam, we had no clue about the indigenous peoples, and we subscribed to the Domino Theory: that if Vietnam fell to Communism, all of Southeast Asia would fall to it. Just as Bush’s people were (and probably remain) ignorant about Iraq’s history and cultural/religious dynamics, the bright boys who got us into Vietnam seemed to know nothing about the history of the region, in which the nations clustered there, and China to the north, traditionally had been enemies of one another.

What this meant was that far from monolithic Communism enveloping the region after the U.S. pullout, within a few years Vietnam was invading Cambodia and then China and Vietnam were fighting a war!

More analogies: We often hear it said that we have to “fight the terrorists in Iraq, or we will fight them here at home.” Same bullshit during the Vietnam era: “We have to fight the communists in Vietnam, or we will be fighting on the beaches of California.”

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Bush’s speech was a string of lies. Let’s see if the mainstream press dissects his BS. I won’t hold my breath.

[davidm]

An interesting historical sidelight: I recall seeing years ago a snippet of an interview that JFK gave to Walter Cronkite in September 1963. I recall Kennedy saying “In the final analysis, it’s their war,” referring to South Vietnam. But it wasn’t until I recently saw the snippet of the interview again here on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG7jjF6xuKM) that I realized what a strong statement Kennedy made.

Three times he declares that he doesn’t think the war can be won unless the South Vietnamese government radically changes its ways. He explicitly says several times that the U.S. can help with advisers, but that the people and the government of the South must win the wear themselves. The snippet concludes with JFK saying it would be a “great mistake” to withdraw, but this is clearly in the context of providing support in the form of advisers to the South. What’s really poignant about this clip is to see, superimposed on the screen at the start, the number of U.S. war dead in Vietnam up to that point in time: 82.

This statement is so strong that it could hardly have been off-the-cuff or unplanned. From this (and other evidence) it’s fairly clear to me that Kennedy had no intention of getting involved in a full-scale war in Vietnam, and already, at the early time, he was telling the American people that war in Vietnam was a fool’s errand. No one can know counterfactual history, but it can easily be thought that the bullet that took Kennedy’s life also took the lives of 50,000 American troops, to say nothing of untold numbers of Southeast Asians, who but for that day in Dallas would otherwise have lived.

[godfry n. glad]

Bush invaded Iraq to dismantle weapons of mass destruction that never existed, attacking a country that did not attack the U.S. on Sept. 11. Of course, as I believe, the real reason we went in can be found in stringing together the first three letters of the original name of the Iraq campaign, which was hurriedly changed when someone noticed what those letters were: Operation Iraqi Liberation. Even that has proved a failure: Iraq is producing less oil now than at the start of the invasion, and none of it is secure.

The key word there is in the last sentence..."producing". Because it has not been producing at all, or at much lower levels than most other oil producing countries since Desert Storm...or even earlier, with the Iran/Iraq war diverting resources and delaying maintenance on oil-producing equipment, since 1979, the reserves of oil still in the ground are relatively higher than in the surrounding nations which have been able to produce. That is one reason why Iraq is more enticing than other oil producing nations.

[Stormlight]

"A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear and the victory must be overwhelming." [George W. Bush address to RNC convention, 8/4/00]

The Republican presidential front-runner also says he learned “the lesson of Vietnam.” “Our nation should be slow to engage troops. But when we do so, we must do so with ferocity. We must not go into a conflict unless we go in committed to win. We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush wrote. [AP, 11/15/99, reporting on George W. Bush’s biography A Charge To Keep]

:rolleye2:

[D. Scarlatti]

The OP's new friend Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel elicited the following response to his defense (http://blogs.jsonline.com/mcilheran/archive/2007/08/23/you-want-to-talk-vietnam.aspx) of Bush's Vietnam remarks:

Elevating the historical aphasia of President Bush’s Vietnam comparison to lucid eloquence is really too much. The point of his argument being that we should have perhaps spent another 10 years in Vietnam? Apparently 55,000 American war-dead in some Southeast Asian backwater was not enough. Never mind that it was the wrong war to fight. We could have won it. And the point is?

The depths of dismal inanity McIlheran can plumb in his columns seems to be bottomless. He is like a parrot who has been taught to squawk a limited number of phrases. And in the same way we teach children by pointing to an apple and saying “apple” or a bird and saying “bird” McIlheran was trained to point to liberals and say “bad” or Iraq War and say “good”. The numbing regularity with which he responds to every issue with this pinched-off, reductive world-view is depressing in its monotony.

[Clutch Munny]

"The anti-war left desperately wanted that loss".

:laugh:

The sheer combination of ignorance and enfranchisement is like a bucket of ice-water in the face.

Seems like the "anti-war left" was hugely overrepresented in the military, then, huh? Judging from the military's own estimates of fraggings, order-refusals, and general tactics for avoiding the prosecution of the war.

[D. Scarlatti]

"The anti-war left desperately wanted that loss".

I think he's retrojecting the conservatives' current pro-Iraq War article of faith, just a bit.